In 1881, Ibsen’s Ghosts was considered shocking for its critique of conventional morality and its unabashed treatment of venereal disease and religious hypocrisy, among other topics. While the specifics of the social issues that the characters grapple with are not pressing today—syphilis is a curable disease, a woman trying to leave an unhappy marriage is not unthinkable, nor is the idea that a person of high social rank might be a degenerate—moral hypocrisy, patriarchy, class resentment, and generational trauma are always ripe for the stage. The gripping, finely acted production of Ghosts now playing at Lincoln Center, directed by Jack O’Brien and adapted by Mark O’Rowe, threads this needle: it retains the historical setting (though with a framing device) and yet makes the moral debates feel like more than artifacts from another era.
All Nighter is the third play by Natalie Margolin that follows college-age female friends during one night, and like her earlier works—The Party Hop, created for an all-star Zoom production during the pandemic, and The Power of Punctuation, staged Off-Broadway in 2016—it showcases the mores and conversational styles of a certain generation of women. All Nighter also showcases excellent performances by five young actresses who have already garnered acclaim.
The Clubbed Thumb theater company follows up last year’s excellent Grief Hotel with another gem that originated in its Summerworks program, Abe Koogler’s Deep Blue Sound, in which a group of islanders in the Pacific Northwest mourn the disappearance of a nearby pod of orca whales. The production, in residency at the Public Theater, is astonishing: Koogler’s play is both strange and naturalistic, as funny as it is deeply moving, even shattering; Arin Arbus’s note-perfect direction is mesmerizing, smartly enhancing the emotional climaxes but never overdoing them; and the ensemble of nine is simply extraordinary.
Matthew Lombardo wrangles comedy out of a story that is often not comical—wisecracks can be hard to resist coming from a wisecracking pro like Caroline Aaron—but both the humor and pathos in his new play Conversations with Mother are calculated and shallow.
One month after Suffs, a celebration of first-wave feminism, closed on Broadway, playwright Bess Wohl shines a spotlight on the second wave in Liberation. Wohl offers vividly sketched characters, a well-honed mix of comedy and drama, and a complex yet heartening portrayal of sisterhood, but falters a bit incorporating her family history into the plotline and attempting to reconcile the 1970s women movement’s racial blind spots.
Grangeville, the title of Samuel D. Hunter’s new piece is, as in most of his plays—Pocatello, Lewiston/Clarkston, Greater Clements (but not The Whale)—the Idaho setting of his latest drama, a two-hander about estranged half-brothers coming together to rehash a lot of anguished family history. If the result is disappointing, it’s because Hunter is working over well-tilled ground.
